Tag Archives: digitalbritain

I love working on strategy with clients especially when we can use scenario planning techniques.

It’s very exciting and engaging. It’s more about trying to understand people and what they might do rather than thinking up products and trying to work out who to sell them to. The nice thing is you can invent quite complex believable worlds with stories and thoughts about how people and businesses exist and thrive; and behaviours need to reflect the conditions in those worlds. It’s not about being right, it’s not about making predictions or being a ‘futurist’. It is about telling stories about the future.

There’s a lot of work and thought needed to create believable stories about the future and they have to be credible. It’s really interesting to see how clients react to scenario planning. If you’re used to strategy being a linear extrapolation of what you do today, then it can be a bit of a shock. The kind of business thinking that places your business at the centre of the picture and then maps the world to it is generally resistant to scenario thinking. If you have someone who thinks like this, you can use expressions like ‘strategic narrative’ and a word with ‘ology’ at the end of it. But don’t kid yourselves – they’re stories.

Scenario planning drives you to think about the world first and then think about what your options and decisions might be in each world.

In theory, scenario worlds should be extreme and quite different. In practice, if you make them too extreme, they cease to be credible. If worlds diverge too quickly then it’s difficult to develop pragmatic strategy. The invented worlds need to overlap to some extent – and it’s in the overlaps and gaps where you can look at the scope for innovation and new ideas. Ideally, you should be able to think up some elements of the strategy you will adopt that work in all the worlds you envisage – this is possible but difficult. A lot of the time though, you tend to map out options as the scenario worlds develop over time.

While it may seem fanciful, we can, though, see signals in the present of how the world might evolve in the future and we can use these as a way to generate different potential worlds. How do you find and listen to those signals and which ones do you use to develop scenario worlds? This is at the heart of the creative process of scenario planning.

You can talk to people working on new things, look at trends, look at what people do around you. For example, a few years ago on trains going up and down to London from Kent, there were increasing numbers of well dressed business men (yes men) of a clear level of seniority using iPads; these were the kinds of people who previously would open their briefcases and bring out paper copies of e-mails (no doubt printed out by their secretaries) and write replies on them. One man used to drive people mad in the mornings by tearing up these printouts in a kind of artisanal shredding process! You can speculate on why this trend was happening. Keyboards are low status or they were unable to use them so no laptop, other men were seen using iPads for business applications (remember David Cameron’s iPad government dashboard app?) so they felt able to, cost reductions and redundancies meant that there were fewer support people around, increasing environmental concerns about waste…..

Another example, in a previous job, we developed scenarios for how people might use mobile technology in their daily lives. One of the scenarios I particularly enjoyed had people walking about with small devices using little screens to control the device and communicate. No PCs, no keyboards, no wires. We got one of our designers to draw (on a big mood board) pictures of people doing this. The client hated it! At that time (and it’s a while ago!) mobile phones were just phones; Short Message Service was used by few people (aka Texting now). Another scenario was a world where the big fixed networks dominated and smart phones were a minority interest (largely due to cost). We looked at how technologies were developing that would lead to smartphones and we looked at behavioural research and consumer analysis, we did PEST analysis in the days before it became PESTLE! And we developed different worlds with different characteristics.

So how does all this relate to business strategy? Using scenarios makes business strategy simpler – if you have a story about how the world might evolve then you can look at how you might behave and the decisions you might make as a result.

The world is a complex place and strategy needs to be simple. Many people think that business strategy needs to be complicated to reflect the complexity of the world. On the contrary business strategy needs to be

1) Simple – so you can “execute” it (ie ‘do it’ – venture capitalists love the term ‘execute’ for some reason)

2) Clear – so you can communicate it to customers, colleagues and other stakeholders

3) Expressed in a model (eventually!) – so you can see if it works

So my advice is, don’t start with a business model and work up, start with your stories of the future and work down, define your strategy simply and clearly and then build a model.

Like this:

The Centre for Creative Collaboration
will close on 17 December 2014

C4CC will close at noon on 17th December 2014. For 5 years, we have supported collaborations between Universities, businesses, staff and students and creative freelancers. In the past two years we have also worked with Small and Medium Enterprises across London as part of the London Creative and Digital Fusion project – supporting more than 200 businesses directly ourselves. We’ve also helped to form and support 37 start-ups creating over 100 jobs.

We’ve spoken to our resident projects and partners about the closure over the past month or so – and this post will, I hope, let a wider group of friends hear the news directly from us. To cut a very long story short – our funding has finished, the University of London has decided not to support us further and the lease on our building expires early next year.

I talked to Lloyd Davis recently and we recalled the excitement of getting the keys early in February 2010 – and how big and empty the space seemed. The project was scary and exciting at the same time. It’s worth remembering that, when we did the research for the project (in 2008/9) there were very few spaces in London that we would now recognise as co-working or collaboration spaces. So it was a bit of a leap in the dark – and a testament to the vision of our early supporters, especially Sir Graeme Davies who was
Vice-Chancellor of the University of London at that time.

We will hold an event on 12 December at C4CC to share our experiences, tell stories and celebrate what we’ve all been part of – if you would like an invitation, please let me know.

My plan is to ‘to do my own thing’ again as an independent consultant and adviser; I’m looking at a number of opportunities for 2015. I’ve learnt a lot of new (and I hope useful!) things in the past 5 years – and I will be happy to help other people and projects to benefit from my experience. So if you’d like to talk about opportunities to work together, please get in touch.

Chi Onwurah comes strongly for open access, but no one defines what they mean by that. Openreach says they’re Open Access… #nextgen12

Shadow Queen of Spades criticises current Spades approach but shares vision of King of Spades at #nextgen12 House of Hearts under attack!

Yardley criticises foundation of King of Spades report – and in doing so gets a weak applause at #nextgen12.

"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice."You must be," said the Cat, or you wouldn’t have come here.” #nextgen12

Lord Inglewood says that “we wouldn’t want to start from here” – but we have to deal with what we’ve got. Yardley says that he sees the HoL model being like sub-loop unbundling; and this hasn’t worked in Europe. He says that the hub concept proposed by the HoL report is flawed economically.

Francesco Caio says UK has done well on usage – need to make sure we equip our people for the future economy – this needs NGA #nextgen12

Yardley says that there are State Aid issues – Inglewood responds that there aren’t such issues if all networks are made open; providing the access is paid for on a realistic basis.

Understanding and Debating the Issues – an INCA Seminar

The Programme is in four sections:

1) The European Dimension

The first session on the agenda focuses on the European dimension, Europe’s ambitions, the 2020 targets, the new draft State Aid Guidelines, CEF, different models for deployment and what we need to do in the UK and Europe to achieve the targets. The speakers contributing in this session include Hervé Dupuy, European Commission, Tony Shortall of Telage and Chris Holden of Corning and the FTTH Council Europe.

2) State Aid in the UK

The second section deals with practical experience from the UK in both urban and rural projects, plus some of the higher level issues about where we are going with the BDUK process. In this session we will hear from David Cullen, INCA Board and former CEO of NYnet, Raj Mack, Head of Digital Birmingham which has recently gained approval for their Ultrafast project and Dave Carter, Chair of INCA and Head of Manchester Digital Development Agency.

3) State Aid & the Private Sector

In the third session we will hear from two key private sector players – Mark Collins, of City Fibre Holdings and Nick James of UK Broadband giving their perspective on how private investment and state aid can best work together with FTTH and Wireless networks.

Also Felipe Florez Duncan from Oxera Consulting, who will speak about the economic aspects of state aid. Oxera produced the widely respected report ‘How A Co-investment Model Could Boost Investments in NGA Networks’, published by Vodafone.

4) State Aid Compliance & the New Draft Guidelines

The final session includes Duncan Gillespie of DLA Piper who will explain some of the key issues in project design, with Louise Lancaster, INCA’s Policy & Regulatory advisor, who has analysed the new draft State Aid guidelines from a UK, non-incumbent perspective.